I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
Yes, but there’s also way better alternatives to Brave.
I guess only Firefox and Firefox based browsers.
But are they as user friendly?
Yes.
Not really.
The problem with this is that you imagine “the average user” as still being decently tech literate. They’re not. If they did, companies wouldn’t buy ads any more, because they wouldn’t make anything off of them, since people don’t watch; but obviously they do.
The average person doesn’t want to have to install an ad-blocker - hell, the average person probably has no real idea of what an ad-blocker even is - and they don’t want to bother configuring anything either. They just want plug and play applications that will do everything they need. And for that, Brave is probably the best. E.g. if a family member called me asking for a browser recommendation, I’d probably just tell them to install Brave. I think I’ll keep doing that until I see a better plug and play browser.
P.S: I use LibreWolf and Firefox.
Librewolf is completely user friendly out-of-the-box. You can touch no settings and get a pretty good experience.
Some sites won’t work properly with LibreWolf (which is typically when I switch to Firefox), and sometimes LibreWolf has to explicitly ask for my permission before doing certain things on certain sites - which is something I like, but it’s also why I wouldn’t recommend it to an average Joe like my dad, for example.
I’ve never really had an issue with sites not working properly with LibreWolf. As for explicit permission to do certain things, basically every browser does that. It’s one button that pops up occasionally in the top left corner.